Legends

I was nine years old. The Wild Thornberrys was still on air and continued to grace the TV’s of bored or adventure-lusting Americans every so often. I knew not what lust was at such a young age, but I had an internal push like that of steam-engines or dying animals that told me that I had to get out and explore and discover and then to travel the world finding out everything there was to know and then to contract a deadly jungle disease and die a legend who’s infected blood would save millions. I decided this because a movie I once saw told me that legends never die. Then There was a huge thunderstorm. The thunder clapped and bashed its head in against lampposts and tree branches to get rid of the frustrating humidity that often plagued its mind during those hot, misty months in the South. Lightening tickled oceans and pools, trying to find a friend. And the clouds, they felt terribly left out, so they began to cry horrid, massive tear drops that engulfed entire ant civilizations without a thought but their own selfish needs. This storm smelled like adventure to me—musky, warm, and alive like a newborn child riddled with newborn colic. I ventured out of the white-washed barrier and into the Wild, armed with no shield aside from lavender shorts and a white tank top. Bushes sang sweet nothings to me as the rain kissed their leaves; they begged me to come over and make the rain jealous, so I did. I narrated my own findings of long lost cultures; the faucet my brother and I had spray-painted the summer before was a relic from an ancient barbarian clan, and the old tennis ball that was matted and mauled by the malevolent rain was actually an old medical tool that the Aztecs used to sedate their poor unfortunate sacrifices. It was liberating. I danced and sang in a tribal tongue I had yet to decode, but felt like longevity and mystery and discovery and death and glory and life and invitation just the same. I reveled in my own success and pictured myself beside the brightest minds in the field once I was sixteen, just like I had when I mistook cracking concrete and old, garden variety seashells for dinosaur bones when I was five. The rain was torrential, but I took it as a blessing of life and happiness and thought it to be dancing along with me. Eventually, I snuck back into my house to imagine my success being acclaimed by the fictitious, and yet viscerally real Nigel Thornberry. My mother saw me and gaped with a mouth that threatened to suck me in like the fascinating paradox, a black hole, that I had eagerly soaked up from the Discovery Channel. I told her that I was dancing and discovering and that I was going to be an adventurer one day, and that I’d become a legend. All she said was that staying in the rain like that would kill me.

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